Walker’s latest venture seems a mixture of those two. It’s an online forum called RottenNeighbor.com, and it allows residents of a neighborhood to complain about the noise, dogs, midnight habits or lawn-mowing antics of the folks next door. Launched last summer, the site was first based entirely out of Walker’s UTC apartment until a portion was purchased by Attenunit, a venture capital firm, and most of the work moved to Austin, Texas.

From the site:

Rotten Neighbor is the first real estate search engine of its kind allowing you to rate and review good and bad neighbors before and after you move so you can make a smart real estate decision. How? By user contributed information on millions of neighbors and neighborhoods in Indiana and nationwide as well as helping you understand Granger neighborhood trends.

I was curious so I searched my hometown of Mishawaka, Indiana. And I found just a few reviews – some very mean, others were like this:

actually shovel your sidewalk in the snow when u have no shovel!

Some thoughts:

Will folks rate libraries?

Will library users want to access the site in libraries – they certainly should be able to!

Shouldn’t this be added to our classes for the public on info literacy in this new world?

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One thought on ““The Dark Side” : The Wisdom of Rating Your Neighbors”

Couldn’t help but do an ego search. Someone actually rated us (my family). Luckily it is a good rating. But still…I don’t know. It’s bad enough to have “slam books” on the world wide web for kids now but do we really want to know what people think of us?

I’m all for free speech and press but at what point does it end. Imagine going through life knowing that any good or bad moment you have could make it to YouTube for the world to see. Imagine your worst moment in high school on YouTube. I wonder what kind of long term effect this will have on kids.